We finally closed in on the first round of UI layout and have finished the developer pass of the mech hanger where all the mech building magic takes place before entering the game. Here is a sneak peak at the newly redesigned mech hanger and you will notice new customization features including a secondary color picker, grunge for the extra dirty feeling, and an inventory of owned parts which will be available post Early Access release.
More updates next week along with a mech hanger tutorial.

Just a quick status update, we had a very small test and video session today with some of the testers whom have been playing Dark Horizons games for about 10 years. Good things were:

1) Had fun blowing the crap out of each other 🙂
2) Got some great video and screen shots for use in greating some media content
3) Saw some o fthe new chassis in action and can now tweak
4) Picked the first 2-3 mission environments to go out with Early Access

The Bad?

Found some issues that we have to fix before we can let more people into test, but hopefully can knock those out quickly and have a new build posted up on Steam.

As we wait for part 2 of the persistence update we thought it would be nice to share some of the things coming together for the Steam early access release.

First, always love to show off the new looks you can have with our new paint jobs etc… What we have added to the mech painter are the ability to paint different sections of the mechs multiple colors and an exciting new grunge feature which lets you weather you mech with battle damage!! As normal you can also choose from dozens of decals and insignia to personalize you mech.

Second is our integration progress with Steam we would like to preview the layout of your new menu system which we are designing to work well with Steam big picture mode as well as set it up to work with gamepads. We also now have the game authenticating with Steam and our multi-player backend!! (NOTE: Forgive our programmer art)

Coming next to our Steam integration and the final steps before launching into EarlyAccess is stats, leaderboards, achievements, and cloud storage for local content.

Leading up to release of Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps (DH: MC) on Steam Early Access we
wanted to share more detailed information about the game and for the series in particular, we
want to discuss community features and the games persistent faction wars feature.

In 2004 we launched our first mech game called Dark Horizons: Lore, a fast paced first person
shooter style mech game. Shortly thereafter and what made the game a finalist in the 2005 IGF
we introduced Invasion which added to the game a persistent online war between the two major
factions of the game universe.

This single feature helped the build our community that supported the game well past us stopping active development, and is what fuels us as a team to continue and improve on the vision of faction wars in DH: MC.

Coming this week we will start posting a series of at least weekly posts discussing the roadmap for Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps starting with a series on the persistence engine and what the design vision is for its development.

We have been working at updating the looking of our mechs with new high resolution textures, and as part of that we are adding additional functionality to allow you to personalize your mech. As in Lore Aftermath you will be able to select from a variety of paint schemes as well as place logos and decals on your chassis. The new feature we are adding is allowing players to paint the mech with multiple colors depending on the paint scheme. This will allow players to really make signature designs for themselves and their squads.

Other features we are looking at are to allow players to create their own squad insignia’s and decal, but this will be a later feature.

Here are some samples of the new higher resolution textures in a variety of base colors.

The next installment of the Dark Horizons universe has been Greenlit by the Steam community. Max Gaming is extremely happy about the support and is currently working on an early access version for Steam. Stay tuned for more information on getting into the game!

As part of our on going support of the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator by Thom Robertson, we are proud to announce that the iOS port is now available. Please visit www.artemis.eochu.com for more information and to purchase this great game.

Artemis is a software game for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. It’s also an app for iPhones, iPads, iPods, Android and is cross-compatible with the PC version.